highly dangerous work of the Keeni Meeni squads operating in the souks and bazaars. There, teams of men, including Jock, all specially trained in CQB and disguised as Arabs, had mingled with the locals to gun down known Yemeni guerrillas.
Loving his work, dangerous though it had been, Jock had been shocked by the extent of his boredom when, back in Britain, he had been RTU’d to his original unit, the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, for a long bout of post-Suez inactivity. Though he subsequently married and had children – Tom, Susan, then Ralph, now all in their teens – he had never managed completely to settle down into the routine of peacetime army life.
For that reason he had applied for a transfer to the SAS, endured the horrors of Initial Selection and Training, followed by Continuation Training and parachute jumping in Borneo. Badged, he had fought with the Regiment in Oman in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, he returned from Oman to more years of relative boredom until 1976, when he was posted to Northern Ireland, where, in Belfast and south Armagh, he learnt just about all there was to know about close-quarters counter-terrorist warfare.
Posted back from Northern Ireland, Jock was again suffering the blues of boredom when, luckily for him, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS decided to keep his CQB specialists busy by having them train bodyguards for overseas heads of state supportive of British interests. One of those chosen for this dangerous, though oddly glamorous, task was Jock, who, bored with his perfectly good marriage, was delighted to be able to travel the world with diplomatic immunity and a Browning 9mm High Power handgun hidden in the cross-draw position under his well-cut grey suit.
During those years, when most routine close protection of UK diplomats in political hotspots was handled by the Royal Military Police, the SAS were still being called in when the situation was particularly dangerous. For this reason, the need for men specially trained in close-quarters work led to the formation of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
In Munich in September 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took over an Olympic Games village dormitory and held Israeli athletes hostage, leading to a bloody battle with West German security forces in which all the hostages, five terrorists and one police officer were killed. The shocked West German and French governments responded by forming their own anti-terrorist squads. In Britain, this led to the formation of a special SAS Counter-Terrorist (CT) team that would always be available at short notice to deal with hijacks and sieges anywhere in the United Kingdom. Those men, like their predecessors in Aden and in the CRW, had been trained in the ‘killing house’. Jock Thompson was one of them.
The CQB House is dubbed the ‘killing house’ for two good reasons. The first is that its purpose is to train men to kill at close quarters. The second is that real ammunition is used and that at least one SAS man has been killed accidentally while training with it.
Jock was mindful of this chilling fact as he led his four-man CT team into the building and along the first corridor, toward rooms specially constructed to simulate most of the situations an SAS man would encounter during a real hostage-rescue operation. The men had already been trained to enter captured buildings by a variety of means, including abseiling with ropes from the roof, sometimes firing a Browning 9mm High Power handgun with one hand as they clung to the rope with the other. This particular exercise, however, was to make them particularly skilled at distinguishing instantly between terrorist and hostage. It was done with the aid of pictures on the walls and dummies that were moved from place to place, or that popped out suddenly from behind artificial walls or up from the lower frame of windows.
This began happening as Jock and his men moved along the first corridor. Dummy figures bearing painted weapons popped out from behind opening doors or window frames to be peppered by a fusillade of bullets from the real weapons of the training team. Once the targets had looked like Russians; now they were men in anoraks and balaclava helmets.
The major accomplishment lay not in hitting the ‘terrorists’ but in not hitting a ‘hostage’ instead. This proved particularly difficult when they had less than a second to distinguish between a dummy that was armed and one that was not. To hit the latter too many times was to invite a humiliating rejection by the SAS and the ignominy of being RTU’d.
The exercise could have been mistaken for a childish game, except for one thing – like the weapons, the bullets were real.
Completing a successful advance along the first couple of corridors, Jock’s team then had to burst into various rooms, selected from drawings of the reconstructed killing house, shown to them during their briefing.
The CT team is divided into two specialist groups: the assault group, who enter the building, and the ‘perimeter containment’ group, consisting of snipers who provide a cordon sanitaire around the scene. In this instance, Jock and his men were acting as an assault group. This meant that they had to burst into a room in pairs and instantly fire two pistol rounds or short, controlled bursts of automatic fire – the famed SAS ‘double tap’ – into each terrorist, aiming for the head, without causing injury to either fellow team members or the hostages.
Reaching their selected rooms, the four-man team divided into two pairs, each with its own room to clear. Leading Red Team, with Danny Boy as his back-up, Jock blasted the metal lock off with a burst from his Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, dropped to one knee as the lock blew apart, with pieces of wood and metal flying out in all directions, then cocked the Browning pistol in his free hand and bawled for Danny Boy to go in.
The lance-corporal burst in ahead of Thompson, hurling an instantaneous safety electric fuse before him as he went. The thunderous flash of the ISFE exploded around both men as they rushed in and made their choice between a number of targets – the terrorists standing, the hostages sitting in chairs. They took out the former without hitting the latter, delivering accurate double taps to the head in each case.
Each man had his own preselected arc of fire, which prevented him hitting one of his own men. In this instance, the two men could easily have done this when they burst from a ‘rescued’ room back into the corridor to come face to face with either another dummy or with the other team, Corporal ‘GG’ Gerrard and Trooper Robert Quayle. Likewise, when Blue Team burst out of their own ‘rescued’ room, they often did so just as a dummy popped out from behind a swinging door, or up from behind a window frame, very close to them. The chilling possibility of an ‘own goal’ was always present.
Even so, while the men had found this form of training exciting, or frightening, in the early days, by now it had become too familiar to present any novelty. To make their frustration more acute, once the figures had been ‘stitched’ with bullets, or the room ‘cleared’ of terrorists, the men then had to paste paper patches over the holes in the figures, using a paste-brush and brown paper, in order that the targets could be used again by those following them. Because they had to do this mundane task themselves – even though they were firing real weapons, exploding ISFE, and hurling stun grenades – they became increasingly bored as they made their way through the various rooms of the killing house.
Their irritation was made all the worse by the fact that a day of such training led not only to sweaty exhaustion, but to raging headaches from the acrid pall of smoke and lead fumes which filled the killing house. So, when finally they had completed their ‘rescue’ and could stumble out into the fresh air, they were immensely relieved.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Danny Boy said later, as they were showering in the ablutions of the spider. ‘If I don’t get killed accidentally by one of you bastards during those exercises, I’ll be killed by the fucking boredom of doing them over and over again.’
‘They don’t bore me,’ Bobs-boy said. ‘I just hate the CRW suits and body armour and helmet and mask. I feel buried alive in them.’
‘You feel buried alive
